The abundant charm of first-time actor James Rolleston, playing the 11-year-old of the title in Boy, doesn't quite save the aimless, nostalgia-woozy second feature from Taika Waititi (2007's Eagle vs. Shark).

With topical revenge fantasies already available (Dogville, the Kill Bills) and with Roy Scheider on hand as a gun-loving paterfamilias, The Punisher mismanages its greatest asset: an unusual embarrassment of camp riches.

Earnest and misguided in equal measure, The Theory of Flightis ostensibly a bold and rare attempt at depicting disabled people as sexual beings, but the notion is couched in such spurious and schematic terms that the film never really stands a chance.

Par for the course in blowout CGI adaptations, a great deal of detail and bustle is gained at the expense of charm - for all the miracles these armies of animators can achieve, they have yet to successfully reproduce a humble artist's line.

It should be mentioned that Garriott's father, Owen, was himself a Skylab astronaut, a fact of which much is made - but that only more obviously shows Man on a Mission for what it is: a puffed-up home movie.

At first, Hoffman appears to be juxtaposing the savoir faire and genuine deprivation of the Depression society with the spoiled, consumption-crazed world we have now, but then he merely lapses into a vague Occupy-ish indictment of the 1 percent and the collapse of community as a cultural foundation.